5 questions you should ask before hiring a web design company

Of course these are not all the questions you could ask from a web design company, but having the answers to these ones, should give you a pretty good idea about whether or not you’re making the right choice

What services do you offer: Building a website is only the first step in establishing web presence. You also need to register a domain, purchase hosting, upload the website to the hosting server, create and maintain your email addresses, make sure your site is performing well in search results, use the proper SEO techniques, promote your site on various social media etc. The best solution is to find a design company that can take care of all these aspects, offering you all the necessary services in a ready-to-go package. Having all these services offered by the same company has several benefits

you don’t need to spend time and effort to understand the different steps

you won’t have to keep in touch with more companies only for your web presence

in case of issues you know exactly who to turn to – no room for pointing fingers: it’s not my fault, the site is OK, it’s the hosting, ask them…no no, the hosting is fine, the site is not developed correctly, ask the designer… the site is great, the SEO services are not OK, that’s why your site is not ranking well in Google…

Do you use pre-built templates or create every site from scratch? If they use only pre-built templates, you might not be able to get exactly what you wanted, only something similar, maybe. If they create every site from scratch, you might have unjustified expenses because they take the time to make something that already exists. So the best answer would be: “actually we use a different approach, depending on your needs and budget”

Using a pre-built template and simply uploading your content onto it. This is quickest and liest expensive solution. Every start-up company can afford such a web presence. And for these companies, having a website which has the same design as 10 other sites on the web is still much better than not having a website at all

Starting from a pre-built template, and customizing it tou your needs. This solution makes up almost 90% of the cases. The designers start from a pre-built template, and modify it to perfectly fit the needs of the customer. This way they spend less time with the design, so the end product will be less expensive, and the customer will still have a unique web site. Win-win.

We develop the entire design starting from scratch. This solution is used for those clients who want strongly branded and completely unique web presence. Not even sky’s the limit in this case, but unfortunately this holds true for the price as well.

How will you manage my project? This one will actually give you answers to more then 1 question.

Will you have an assigned contact person within the company, or just speak to the employee that’s closest to the phone? Having your dedicated contact is almost a “must” and has many benefits: you develop a closer relation, maybe even a friendship with that person, so communication will be a lot easier, you will understand each other easier and faster, plus there will be no annoying issues like “oh, sorry, that’s not done, you told my colleague about that request, I didn’t know…”

The company you hire to develop your site has the experts, and their opinion and proposed solutions must be valued, but in the end you’re the customer, you pay for it, therefore you should be in charge. You should be involved in every stage of the project and be able to make “on the fly” changes when these do not yet involve extra costs. It is very important that you approve every stage of the project, before the next one begins.

What do you need from me to get started. The answer “not a thing, you just sit back and relax, we’ll take care of everything” is the worst possible answer:) At our company for example, we first ask the customer to fill out a short questionnaire. After analyzing these answers we can already figure out the needs of our client with an accuracy of about 70-80%. Than we talk to the client several times, clarifying any issues and asking them to “involve” us in their business and talk about their vision regarding the future of their company. Only then can we know exactly what the customer expects from us and make sure that the end product will be exactly what they wanted.

How will you determine the price of my site? You should always get a price/project, a price that includes everything from design and development to SEO, domain issues and hosting. Never accept a price/hour for building your site, or if you do, be sure that the exact number of payable hours is clearly specified, otherwise you might get in trouble. Developing a website or a computer software is not like building a house or a car. You won’t say after completing a house: “ok, now take down those three walls and rebuild them in another style”. Or if you say that, you know exactly what kind of extra costs to expect. But with computer software and web sites, the temptations are great from both parts: yours as well as the web designer company’s part. As the project evolves you will all start to see “little” things that would look better in another way, so why not change them? But then the hours accumulate, and the extra time will mean extra costs.

Very important: Very important: after the initial discussions, before the web design company actually starts working on the project, make sure to have a written document with all the specifications you agreed upon, with all the functionalities of your site and all the services performed, written down exactly, as well as the final price you’ll have to pay and the deadline until which everything must be functional. This document will protect you as well as the company. You will know exactly what you get for your money, and when, and if something is missing at the end, the company must provide it or make the necessary adjustments to your site without any complaints. Also, if you ask for any changes at the end, you will also know exactly what you will be charged in addition to the initial amount.